New Black Panthers

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The New Black Panthers or New Black Panther Party (NBPP) , formally known as the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, is a U.S.-based black power organization founded in Dallas in 1989 by community activist and radio producer Aaron Michaels.

The organization attracted many breakaway members of the Nation of Islam when former NOI minister Khalid Abdul Muhammad became the national chairman of the group from the late 1990s until 2001. In 1998 Muhammad brought the organization into the national spotlight when he led the group to intervene in response to the 1998 murder of James Byrd in Jasper, TX. He also made the NBPP well-known for their vehement school board disruptions and public appearances. The group is currently led by Malik Zulu Shabazz, and still upholds Khalid Abdul Muhammad as the de facto father of their movement.

The New Black Panther Party claims to self-identify with and uphold the legacy of the original Black Panther Party, but is largely seen by both the general public and by prominent members of the original party as wholly illegitimate and even charlatan. The foundation members containing a number of the original party's leaders once successfully sued the group, though their ultimate objective in doing so — to prevent the NBPP from using the Panther name — appears to have been unsuccessful.

In particular, although it says it sees capitalism as the fundamental problem with the world and "revolution" as the solution, the new party does not draw its influences from Marxism or Maoism as the original party did. Instead, in a carefully-worded, roundabout form of ethnic nationalism, they say that Marx himself based his ideology and teachings on indigenous African cultures, and that the NBPP therefore need not look to Marxism or Maoism as a basis for their program, but can look to ideologies that stem directly from those African origins.

Many groups subscribing to varying degrees of radicalism over the past generation have called for the "right to self-determination" for blacks, particularly U.S. blacks. But critics of the NBPP claim that this self-proclaimed descendent group represents a dangerous departure from the original; specifically, that it is loudly anti-white, and also anti-Semitic. The NBPP is considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be a "black racist" hate group, and even many of the mildest critics of the organization seem to believe that, at the very least, the NBPP's provocative brand of black nationalism undermines other civil rights efforts.

As a possible example of such unhealthy extremism, it is sometimes pointed to that Muhammad organized the "Million Youth March", a youth equivalent of the Million Man March, in Harlem in which 6000 people protested police brutality. The actual content of the rally featured a range of speakers calling for the extermination of whites in South Africa, and ended in scuffles with the NYPD as Muhammad urged the crowd to attack those officers who had attempted to confiscate the NBPP members' guns. Chairs and bottles were thrown at the police but only a few in the conflict suffered injuries. Perhaps most significantly, Al Sharpton appeared and spoke at this event, and was criticized later for taking part in its controversial rhetoric. The "Million Youth March" became an annual event thereafter, but rapidly lost popularity as time progressed.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City and Washington, DC the party began distributing propaganda around the country that Israel had planned and financed the attacks and that 4,000 Israelis who worked at the World Trade Center were warned ahead of time by their government and called in sick the day of the attack — a 9/11 conspiracy theory popularized in Amiri Baraka's poem "Somebody Blew Up America." The party also participated in the 2002 Reparations marches on Washington that drew crowds of tens of thousands of African-Americans from around the United States.